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A few days ago, I came across (yet another) blog post about “the myth of ‘rape culture’” and no, I’m not linking to it here. Last night on Twitter, thanks to The Nation’s Aura Bogado – read her latest here – I came across (yet another) hashtag that had descended into… well, I’ll let you see for yourself.

But wait, there’s more.

So just remember, folks, next time you hear some uptight, panties-in-a-twist feminist ranting about “rape culture” and “normalization of intimate violence” and “people not taking sexual violence seriously,” that those harpies are full of it. Rape culture is just a myth! I mean, I had to look really hard to find the dozens of examples I found of references to roofies, chloroform, car trunks, bats, slipping molly into champagne, and just telling her she’s going whether she likes it or not! I had to scour the internet. I had to click on a hashtag. I mean, you’ll find sexism everywhere if you look hard enough.

Or, you could just wake up and look around and realize that, holy shit, we live in a rape culture- nothing mythical about it.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009.
Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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